Holy scrap: Canton selling a big pile of it

Friday

It's filled mostly with pieces of pipe of all shapes and sizes, fire hydrants, a smorgasbord of fittings and water meters.

CANTON Every time a piece of the city's 650 miles of underground waterlines springs a leak, a pile of discarded scrap metal behind the water department grows wider and taller.

When crews cut out sections of deteriorated or broken pipe to replace it with new ones, they have to dispose of the old pipes. They bring them back to the water department office on Harrisburg Road NE and dump them into a pile in the rear of the complex.

"Instead of just landfilling it, which wouldn't be a good idea, we sell it," said Water Superintendent Tyler Converse.

The pile has grown to about the size of a three-car garage. It's filled mostly with pieces of pipe of all shapes and sizes, fire hydrants, a smorgasbord of fittings and water meters.

"It still has some value," Converse explained.

Mainly as scrap metal, which can be recycled. The bulk of the water pipes are made of cast iron, an alloy that consists of iron, carbon and silicon -- and they typically date to the 1940s.

So roughly once a year, when the pile gets as large as it stands now, the city takes bids from anyone interested in buying it. Bidders have until 2 p.m. Monday to place a formal proposal, which includes an offered price per ton. The pile is weighed after bids are opened.

Last year, the water department made $21,212 on the sale of scrap metal, and took in $29,405 the year before, according to annual reports for the office.

The going rate to sell that type of scrap cast iron pipe is $160 for a net ton at Morris Brothers, a longtime Canton metal recycler of both ferrous metals, such as cast iron and steel, and non-ferrous metals, including copper, brass and aluminum.

Sixty-seven million metric tons of steel and iron were processed in the U.S. in 2015, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. The metals were then, in turn, used to make more than 60 percent of the total raw steel produced in the country.

In a study released last year by the Institute, research showed the overall scrap recycling industry in the U.S. metals, plastics, rubber, paper, textiles and electronics -- generates nearly $117 billion in economic activity every year.